D&D 5E New Monster Manual Cover

From IGN, the cover of the 2025 Monster Manual!

@Morrus

 

[MonsterEnvy]

The style is too blurry and washed out. Same complaint for the other two covers. Also the characters are always in some weird pose facing in an odd direction instead of facing their enemy. IMO the Pathfinder covers blow these out of the water both in their art style and composition.

Are you sure that's not cause you are looking at the low quality version. Cause it's not blurry at all too me.

Also the mage is facing the beholder it's beside her, Minsc is focused on the enemies below.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Cant buy it in good conscious. Minsc is a 2hander man.

 

[mamba]

People posting MM (and MC) covers just reinforces that this is the best MM/MC cover out of any edition. Albeit that's a very low bar to hurdle.

lol, unfortunately true. I guess the best one so far imo was

 

[Uta-napishti]

Hey, an action scene! Still a kinda pose-ish action scene for the two central PCs, but this is pretty fun!

 

[mamba]

IMO the Pathfinder covers blow these out of the water both in their art style and composition.

not so sure about that...

 

[Stormonu]

lol, unfortunately true. I guess the best one so far imo was

View attachment 366259

Black Dragon is crossed-eyed. Lizardman has a come-at-me-bro MCU pose.

 

[Meech17]

Black Dragon is crossed-eyed. Lizardman has a come-at-me-bro MCU pose.

They're all looking in opposite directions.. Especially the Dragon

 

[Uta-napishti]

I'm growing to appreciate that WotC is resetting most of their settings back to their original date and just not advancing the timeline. Considering all the hoops Faerun had to go through to reset things back, it probably would have been simpler to just go back to 1392 or whatever it was...

The best way to play the Forgotten Realms is to reset the timeline to the grey box - it was jam packed with adventure hooks and news for the year 1358 DR and focused on the Dales region, which was a great starting area.

 

[Charlaquin]

Hey, an action scene! Still a kinda pose-ish action scene for the two central PCs, but this is pretty fun!

What is the alternative to “pose-ish”? Like, I understand the complaint when the image is just of characters facing towards the frame, standing in a ready stance without context for why they’re there or what they’re looking at. But this isn’t that. There’s a full scene here, with monsters in-frame that the heroes are facing off against. Do people really want them to be in less dynamic body positions? I feel like that would look very strange.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Always good to know that, the moment I get excited about a cover, I can go into the discussion to have all that excitement washed away. Glad to know this community is one where all my excitement can get trashed, so I don't have to worry about enjoying anything.

I mean, we literally have a hero staring directly at a monster, swords drawn to jump down into the fray.... and people are saying it is pointless posing with no one looking at anything, just like the last art and the art before that and the art before that and the art before that...

I like the art. Wish I could have looked at it without immediately trying to figure out how people would attempt to trash it, so I could get my hopes up about an actually discussion about how cool it was.